


blood // stone

by apocalyvse



Category: Z-O-M-B-I-E-S (Disney Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, But also comfort, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Human AU, Hurt/Comfort, Zombie Apocalypse, seriously a lot of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:35:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24384388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apocalyvse/pseuds/apocalyvse
Summary: Zed's at football practise when the sky erupts.
Relationships: Zed Necrodopoulus & Eliza Zambie, Zed Necrodopoulus & Zoey Necrodopoulus, Zed Necrodopoulus/Addison Wells
Comments: 6
Kudos: 31





	blood // stone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [keep_swinging](https://archiveofourown.org/users/keep_swinging/gifts).



> this was inspired by a prompt I recieved on tumblr from keepswingin, which was 'zeddison + explosion'. 
> 
> she also wrote the last four paragraphs of the fic because i got stuck but we're not gonna talk about that.
> 
> anyway. ennnnnjoy.

“I can walk Zoey home, if you want,” Addison offers as the final bell rings on Wednesday afternoon.

Zed looks at her in surprise, slamming his locker closed and hefting his bag onto his shoulders. “Are you sure?” he asks as they walk towards the school’s exit.

“Yeah,” Addison insists. “We’re meeting up after your football practise to study, remember? I have to stop by Eliza’s anyway, so I’ll just wait for you at yours.”

“You’re the best,” he says and finds her hand in the space between them, squeezing it as their fingers interlace. “Zoey’s going to be so excited. She hates waiting around for football.”

“And you hate waiting around for her to finish cheer practise.” Addison reaches around with her other hand to poke him in the chest, grinning. “That’s what you get for living all the way out in West Seabrook.”

“I don’t hate watching cheer!” Zed argues, holding the door open for her. “I get to watch you!”

“You should be watching your little sister,” Addison scolds him, but she’s smiling from ear to ear, a face so bright she puts the overcast sky to shame.

As if summoned by her words, Zoey comes skipping up to them, having raced over from her classroom in the primary school next door. “Hey, Zoey,” Zed says, but she doesn’t pay him any attention, her eyes fixed on his girlfriend instead.

“Did you ask him?” she says, bouncing on her toes. “Can we go home? I wanna go play with Puppy, and give him a bath, and we can make cookies, and-”

“Yeah, we can go,” Addison laughs. Zoey’s face lights up, and Zed lets go of Addison’s hand so that she can take his little sister’s instead.

“There better be some cookies for me when I get home,” he threatens and leans over to ruffle her hair. Zoey squeaks and slips out from under his grasp, hiding behind Addison as she tries to fix her pigtails.

“Big meanies don’t get cookies,” she tells him with all the attitude of someone twice her size. Addison grabs her hand again and steers her away, even as Zed laughs.

“I’ll see you later!” she calls over her shoulder and he blows her a kiss before turning in the direction of the football field.

\---

He’s halfway down the field, passing a ball idly back and forth to Wynter, when he feels the air rising and rattling around him, a wave of heat and rolling noise hitting him so hard he almost falls to his knees in the grass.

Wynter throws the ball, but it sails right past him and skips off into the bushes at the side of the field as he turns and searches for the source of the noise. The other players are scattered across the field, and none of them are moving - their eyes are fixed on the sky, and the smoke that rises above the trees, blotting out the sun.

Light flashes from somewhere within the haze, and Zed could swear for a moment he sees a hint of green within the ashes.

“What’s that?” Wynter asks, coming up behind him. Zed shakes his head, unable to give her an answer. Somewhere in the distance, a siren begins to howl, loud enough to be heard across the whole town.

“Zed! Wynter!” His eyes are pulled away from the smoke, the thick cloud that reaches higher and higher into the sky the longer he watches, and down to their coach, beckoning to them from the bleachers. He doesn’t hear what Wynter says to him after that, but he does feel her hand, wrapped tightly around his arm, and when she pulls him in the direction of the rest of their team he follows without complaint.

They gather at the foot of the bleachers, standing in a circle out of habit more than anything else. Their eyes flicker up to the smoke and back down to their coach, the mumbled words between them filled with uncertainty. Wynter drags Zed into his place in the circle, his eyes still on the smoke, a bad feeling swirling in his gut (he doesn’t want to believe he knows where that smoke is coming from…but he does, better than anyone else here).

“What’s happening?” Jack asks, his arms crossed, his mouth twisted in a way that makes it look like he is trying not to laugh. Beside him, his friends glance back at the smoke and towards each other with an excited glint to their eyes that belies the horror of the smoke and heat in the air.

“Well…I don’t know for sure…” Coach replies, shifting nervously. “But they’re saying there was an explosion in town.” A hushed murmur runs through the team. Zed is silent, tight-lipped. _Let it be on this side of the wall,_ he wishes; because it can’t be true, it can’t be real. _They’ll be safe, they’ll be okay, they’ll go to the gate._

“Practise is over!” Coach says over the noise, the nervous chatter that’s growing louder by the second. “Come inside, where it’s safe, and then we’ll call your parents to come and get you.”

He shepherds them between the bleachers, back towards the school. Most of them have their phones out of their pockets already, texting or calling, taking one last glance at the smoke before they go back inside. Zed doesn’t move, doesn’t reach for his phone – his eyes are fixed on the smoke as it billows into the sky, his hands limp at his sides.

“Zed?” Wynter says, tapping his arm. “Are you okay?”

Finally, he tears his eyes away from the sky, turns instead to Wynter’s worried face. “That smoke,” he says slowly. “It’s coming from-”

“Necrodopoulis!” Coach calls from behind them. “Barkowitz! Come on!”

“Come on, Zed,” Wynter says and tugs at his arm, her eyes wide in alarm. “I’m sure it’s fine, we’ll just go inside and-”

“I have to go, Wynter.” He tugs his arm out of her grip. “Tell Coach I’m going home!” he throws over his shoulder as he breaks into a run, bolting across the field.

There are voices behind him, chasing him, howling for him to come back. They’re trying to tell him that it’s not safe, that he has to stay here and wait for a parent he already knows won’t arrive. He can’t hear them over the sound of his heart pounding in his ears. His stomach, churns, like he might throw up, and his palms are slick with sweat as he vaults over the field’s fence and fumbles for his phone, dialling his dad’s number.

The phone rings, and rings, and rings as he runs, the streets all blurring together around him.

When he doesn’t pick up, the silence rings the loudest of all.

\---

Seabrook has always been a weird place.

It starts with the ancient stone wall that surrounds half the town, defining the line that separates East Seabrook and West Seabrook. The town’s history says it was built around the pioneer’s town, to protect them from wolves and wild animals, and when the town had expanded past its borders and down to the sea, no one had ever gotten around to tearing it down. Now it’s a heritage site, and one of Seabrook’s only tourist destinations – and, of course, it serves to keep the rick middle-class from having to look out their windows and see the dated rental houses of their poor factory workers.

Then, there’s the cult-like appreciation for East Seabrook High School’s cheerleading team. There’s only two reasons Zed tolerates the ego of the cheerleading team and the way they always overshadow his football team, no matter how perfect a season they turn out, and their names are Addison and Zoey (typical, that everyone he loves would join his mortal enemy’s side).

And who could forget the power plant, standing tall and proud and so, so _weird_ , just one block from the Unity Gate, the main thoroughfare between East and West Seabrook. No one seems to know how it works, where the power comes from, how the one plant provides for the whole town without ever once coming up short or burning out its ancient power lines. There’s rumours that the whole thing is run from one ancient manual, written when the whole thing was first built, and that even Smeltings, the man who owns it, doesn’t know how it generates power.

There’s always been plenty of legends about the power plant and its vague history, it’s _mysterious energy source_ that had been dug out of the woods on some summer’s day years and years ago. There’s always been plenty of conjecture about its future too, about the secrecy in which it’s run and the way the machinery inside it has _never_ been updated or replaced, not once. People have always said it was liable to break down, that it shouldn’t be trusted, that it was a health hazard in waiting.

That doesn’t matter anymore though. Now the weirdest thing about Seabrook is the could of smoke that sits, heavy and too thick to see through, over everything west of the power plant, flashing like green lightning in the middle of a sunny afternoon.

\---

Zed reaches the Unity Gate in record time, his phone gripped so tightly in his hand that it almost shatters from his grip.

He wishes it would. No one is answering anyway; not his dad, not Addison, not Eliza or Bonzo or any of their neighbours. Even the emergency lines are busy, clogged with panicking people from the eastern side of the wall.

The gate is surrounded by people, a crowd so thick he’s got no hope of finding anyone from East-side in it. At the front of the crowd there’s police officers, lining the gate, trying to control the crowd before someone tries to enter the town…and then there’s people from the west, his people, covered in dirt and stumbling on exhausted legs as they escape from the smoke and the flash of the flames.

Zed stands on his toes, scanning the faces of the people exiting. There’s precious few of them – just stragglers stumbling from the haze and through the iron gates, dropping to the ground when they are sure they’re safe. None of them are the people he so desperately wants to see, the people he’d most hoped would be here.

 _They could be at the northern gate,_ he reminds himself, searching and searching for a flash of white hair, for Zoey’s ashy blonde pigtails (for his dad’s bald head, but it won’t appear, the pit in his stomach knows even if he doesn’t).

Out of the smoke come three new figures, two tall boys and a shorter girl, stumbling along in their shadows. She stops to cough in the gateway, and as she lifts her head, he realises it is Izzy, one of the girls that lives on his street. She plays football with them some afternoons, in the park space down the road, and she’s helped Zoey with her cheerleading sometimes, even though Izzy is on West Seabrook’s team and Zoey is on the East team.

Both her parents work at the power plant, Zed remembers, and he resists the urge to stumble away and throw up.

“Izzy!” he calls instead, just loud enough to be heard over the crowd, and ducks around a police officer who is trying to control to the crowd to get to her. “Izzy! Are you alright?”

She coughs again as he reaches her, one hand curling around his forearm, and turns to the side to spit out a mouthful of something black and slimy. “Z-Zed?” she asks, staring at him like she can’t quite believe he is here. “H-how – I thought-”

“What’s happening?” he asks, mindful of the smoke hanging over his home, the acrid smell of chemicals burning in the air and the sound of sirens howling from near and far.

She frowns at him in confusion; she’s pale and shaking, he realises, and her heart is beating so fast he can feel it through her fingers on his arm. “You don’t know?” she asks, confused. “You don’t-?”

“I was at football practise,” he explains, and then asks again, “What happened? What’s going on?”

“The-the-” She squeezes her eyes shut, like she’s searching for the words. “The power plant exploded! I don’t know – Zach told me, he was…waiting for someone, he said the whole thing is on fire…” There are tears running down her cheeks, Zed realises as she reaches up to wipe them away with her sleeve.

She coughs again. “They’re all dead, Zed, they’re all – my-” She half turns, points towards the gates, and he expects her to be upset, expects her to be hysterical, but instead she’s calm, like she’s in a trance, even as tears roll down her cheeks.

He resists the urge to shake her, instead placing a hand on her shoulder, turning her back towards him. “Izzy,” he says sharply, catching her attention. “Did you see Zoey, and Addison?”

“I…” She nods slowly. “I saw them…running - but they went the – went the-” She screws up her face, and points towards the northern gate. “That way,” she says instead, and then she lets go of her grip on his arm and stumbles backwards on stiff legs, barely staying on her feet.

“Are you okay?” he asks, brow furrowed in concern, and takes half a step after her.

“Yes, I just – I – I-” She points back to the smoke and then waves him away, turning to join the other survivors who are sitting up against the wall, breathing hard and fast. He waits until she’s limped over and sat down safely on the ground before he leaves, already sure of the shortest course to the northern gate.

It’s only as he runs away, disappearing down the street, that he realises she had only started limping after talking to him.

\---

The North Gate is the same as the Unity Gate – the same crowd, the scattered survivors, the absence of his family. The smoke is thicker here, even though it is further from the inferno, the haze drifting closer to the gates. Only the wind, blowing straight off the sea and into West Seabrook, keeps the clouds from drifting towards them and covering the whole town.

Zed tries to get closer to the gate, tries to see further into West Seabrook, to see anything at all. _It’s just smoke_ , he thinks. _I should go and find them_ ; but as the thought comes to his mind, an officer shoves him back behind an imaginary like and warns him to keep his distance.

“I live there!” he shouts. “My family are in there! I have to go and find them!” But there’s a hundred more people yelling the same thing around him, and the officer isn’t listening, just shoves him back more insistently. He stumbles into some East-siders and gives up. The police will have it under control. Addison will bring Zoey out safe. His _dad_ will bring them out, and they’ll all be together. They’ll all be safe.

(His dad works at the power plant. His dad hadn’t come to pick Zoey up after school today.)

He watches the survivors instead, the people who have been lucky enough to stumble their way out of the smoke unharmed. And then he watches the police, their unusual movements catching his eye; the ones on crowd control are tense, batons and guns sliding slowly into their hands as they walk the line – as they ask everyone to back up ten paces more. The others are moving between the survivors, crouching carefully beside them, asking them questions, watching them and muttering to each other as they cough or pull at their hair or stumble over to one another in search of comfort.

The pit in his stomach grows wider and wider.

There’s the crackle of a radio from a nearby officer’s belt, a panicked message that Zed can’t quite hear through the static. At the same time, a large group of people stumble from the smoke. They’re running, Zed realises with a start, flying down the street with their sleeves pulled over their mouths and a wild fear in their eyes.

“Move!” an officer yells, somewhere to his left – and then they are hauling the survivors up off the ground, poking and prodding and shoving them towards the gates and back into the smoke, into the path of the people that are running. Zed stands frozen to the spot, his mouth half-open as if to say something – and then he spots Eliza at the front of the running crowd, and Zoey right behind her, and his heart almost stops.

“ _Eliza!_ ” he yells, in relief, in hope, and he runs towards the gates, regardless of what the police are doing. The crowd goes with him – looking for people they love or just morbidly curious, he doesn’t know and he doesn’t care. Eliza is here. Eliza is safe, and Zoey is with her, and surely Addison will be right behind them, out of the fire, out of the danger, safe here with him-

There’s a crash of metal, loud enough to make his ears ring, and the gates slam closed between them.

“Stay back!” an officer yells in the cacophony that follows, throwing Zed to the ground. He falls on his back, winded, and just barely avoids being trampled by the churning, confused crowd around him, their voices rising and rising, in protest, in confusion.

“Let us out!” he hears Eliza screaming as he struggles to his feet, lost in a crowd of people. “There’s something coming, there’s something after us, please, let us in, please-”

“Get _back_!” someone roars over the top of her, and then a baton thuds against flesh, unable to be seen by Zed. “It isn’t safe! Get away from the gate!”

Zed ignores the warnings of the officers, ignores the scared people around him, the cries for help, for understanding, for the gates to be opened just for a second so that they can save their friend or relative. He shoves his way to the front of the crowd, wraps his hand around the bars and steps over the body on an unconscious police officer – and finds himself face-to-face with Eliza, her eyes wide and desperate.

“Zed!” she exclaims, and her fingers wrap around his, squeezing tight. “Zed, you have to help, you have to open the gate – Zed, she didn’t breathe it in, Zed-”

“I can’t open the gate,” he gasps, and the way her eyes widen and her breath catches guts him and splits him in half – but there’s no way he can get to the padlock, no way he can heave the heavy gate open with the crowd pressed up against either side of it. “What’s going on, Eliza?” he asks instead. “Why did they lock the gate? Where’s Addison?”

“There’s something in the smoke,” she tells him, talking fast, shouting over the cacophony of voices around them. “But Zoey didn’t breathe it in Zed, we’re not – we’re okay, she’s okay, I promise.”

She’s making no sense as she turns and pulls Zoey out from behind her. “Where’s Addison?” he asks again, but Eliza just shakes her head and points to the small gap between the gate and the ground.

“Help her climb through!” she yells, and then she helps Zoey onto the ground and under the fence. He pulls his little sister through from the other side – she barely fits, and she cries out in pain as she slides under, the metal and the paved ground scraping at her skin. But then she’s through, she’s in his arms, on the right side of the fence. She’s safe. She’s here.

He looks back up at Eliza. “Your turn!” he shouts and gestures for her to climb through, desperate. She stares at him until he stands back up, and then she shakes her head slowly.

“I won’t fit!” she tells him and kicks a foot at the gap. “I can’t – I can’t get out. I don’t fit.”

“Yes you can!” he shouts back, desperate. “Just try! You’ll fit!”

“No, Zed,” and there are tears in her eyes, streaking down her cheeks, her hands trembling in fear as she places a hand back on the bars of the gate. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her cry. It’s the first time she’s ever been afraid. “Zed, I-”

Whatever she’s going to say next – whatever Zed _could_ say next, faced with the grim acceptance on her face and the unknown danger behind her – is cut off by a scream, high and sharp and ringing in his ears even when it cuts off. The whole crowd goes silent at the noise, shocked, confused, terrified of what comes next.

A snarl rips through the air, and then a body flies through the air and slams into the gate, crumpling to the ground.

The world erupts into chaos and light and sound. Zed stares at the body, uncomprehending. It is a man that he knows, a man his dad waves to on the street, or stops to have a drink with at a street party. Now he is dead, his eyes glassy and his head cracked open like an egg, the white of his skull visible where his hair should be.

“Zed,” Eliza says, and she’s reaching through the bars for him, pressed up against the metal like she might just fall through it if she tries hard enough. Behind her, people are fighting – people are _dying_ , so fast that he can’t comprehend what is happening. He takes her hand, and she squeezes his fingers, harder than they’ve ever been held before.

“It’s okay,” he says, utter nonsense, his eyes still trying to turn to the chaos behind her. “It’ll be okay. It’ll all work out.”

“I’m scared,” she says, and her voice is hoarse and raw, barely able to spit the words out. “I-I-I’m…I’m scared, I’m-”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” over and over again, like he could have saved her, like there’s nothing else to say – and there’s plenty to say, but he is scared too, and his mind has gone blank. His sister clings to his chest, so tight he can’t breathe, and there are snapping teeth and blazing eyes behind his best friend, and he doesn’t know what’s happening or why it’s happening, and Addison is still _gone_ , still somewhere behind those gates, and he is scared, he is terrified, he never wants to let Eliza go-

A hand, pale and bloodstained and laced with veins of black and red, wraps around her throat, and their hands are ripped apart. There’s not even time for her to scream, for Zed to shout; on minute, she is there, clutching at his hand, and the next there is a sickening _crunch_ and she is gone, dangling lifelessly from the hand of a woman with mad, hungry eyes and blood dripping down her chin.

She smiles at Zed, her lips twitching, muscles bulging in her jaw, and then she turns and staggers away, dragging Eliza away with her.

Another man, disfigured and soaked in blood, slams into the gate where Eliza had stood, roaring as he reaches through the bars in search of Zed’s skin. He flinches and stumbles back, Zoey in his arms, and then stares as more and more of them stack up – hungry, angry, mindless faces, their hands turned to claws, their feet ignorant of the bodies piled on the ground, the slaughter they’ve created.

He should move – he should run away, like the others do, should stop looking at the bodies, at the insanity in the eyes of the people that created them as they hunt for more prey. He should take his little sister somewhere she won’t have to see them, but he doesn’t, he can’t. He stands there and stares until a police officer drags him away, pulls him and Zoey halfway down the street and sits them down on a curb between a squadron of ambulances and flashing lights and waking nightmares he can’t get out of his head.

\---

Chief Dale finds him in the last rays of the setting sun, under the flashing lights of an ambulance.

He’s sitting on a stretcher with Zoey, wrapped in a silver blanket and cradling his head in his shaking hands. He’s just thrown up, and the bile still stings at the back of his throat, his stomach raw and empty. He’d hoped that throwing up would make him feel better, but it just makes him feel worse – he’s dizzy now, and he can’t stop shaking, and every time he closes his eyes he sees Eliza, terrified, desperate-

 _Dead_.

“Zed!”

His name echoes across the street, followed by footsteps running, and his head snaps up, his heart in his throat – but no, it is not his father. It is Addison’s, and somehow, that is even worse. He turns his gaze back to the reflection of the lights on the asphalt and wonders if he needs to throw up again.

“Zed.” A shadow falls across him, and a hand touches his arm, recoiling quickly when he flinches away, straight into Zoey. “Zed, where’s Addison?”

He can’t raise his head, can’t look Dale in the eye. He can’t open his mouth to speak – and even when he does, none of the words come out. They stick like plaster to the back of his throat, impossible to peel off.

“Where’s Addison?” Dale asks, his voice rising in panic the longer the silence goes on. “Where is she? Where’s my daughter?” He reaches up with one hand, combs it through his hair like he’s not sure what else to do with it. “Was she in there, when that happened?” he asks, desperate, pleading. “Was she in there? Do you know where she is?”

“She stopped to help someone,” Zoey whispers, and her cold hands wrap around Zed’s arm.

Dale whips around to stare at her. “What did you say?” he snaps, and Zoey presses closer to her brother in fear.

“Leave her alone,” Zed rasps from a throat that is sore and dry and a gut that’s been wrenched in two. He has never liked Dale, and Dale has never liked him – and without Addison here to remind them to be nice, he can’t find the will to have any manners at all.

“She walked me home from school, because Zed had football,” Zoey says in her smallest voice and sniffs. “We went to see Eliza, and then there was-”

“Where is she?” Dale asks again; and he’s sure to be gentle this time, kneeling a safe distance from Zed’s hands to catch her eye.

“We ran away, but someone was hurt, so she stopped to help them,” Zoey tells him. “She was behind us, and then she got lost in the smoke, and we kept running. Eliza said she would catch up but they shut the gates, and then the monsters came and she wasn’t there.”

There’s a moment when not a sound comes from any of them…and then a sob rips from the back of Dale’s throat. Zoey curls into Zed again, her tears soaking his shirt as she sniffles and cries quietly at the memory that is fresh in their mind.

Dale doesn’t ask if they are okay or assure them that it isn’t their fault. He doesn’t ask how Zoey got out and how Eliza didn’t. He never offers them a place to stay or a dollar to afford a meal if they can ever manage to feel hungry again.

He walks away and he doesn’t look back, and he never finds it in himself to offer Zed a smile again.

\---

They end up at Wynter’s eventually, after a long night sitting by an ambulance, just out of view of the wall. Zed’s not sure how she knows to call in the small hours of the morning, just when the future is most bleak, but she does, and when he hangs up the phone it’s only twenty minutes before she walks around the corner and taps him gently on the arm in comfort, and then wraps Zoey in a warm embrace, just the kind of hug Zoey needs right now.

Wynter’s a foster kid, and so are her two siblings, and so it’s easy to find a bed for Zed to curl up in, even if it means her brother gets relegated to the couch. Zoey refuses to leave him until Wynter’s parents give up, and as dawn cracks the horizon, they lie down together in an unfamiliar room and stare at a ceiling that has no chips in the plaster to count, and find that they cannot sleep.

“Zoey?” Zed whispers in the darkness, unable to bear it any longer.

“Yeah?” she replies, her face buried in their pillow.

“Where was dad, when it all happened?”

“He was at work,” she tells him, so softly that he almost doesn’t hear her.

 _At work_.

Dead.

Gone.

 _They’re all dead_ , Izzy had said; and she is dead too, her blood drying on the pavement outside the Unity Gate, waiting to be scrubbed off in the morning. Almost everyone had died at that gate, the radio had said on their way home, before Wynter’s mum had turned it off. The monsters had come there first, before their slaughter at the North Gate, the blood that ran under the bars at the South Gate, before hammering their fists against the walls all night long.

The death of his father a fresh knife in his gut and the words of a dead girl echoing in his ears, Zed sits up, puts his head in his hands, and sobs until he has no tears left to cry.

\---

He goes back sometimes, when he can handle it, when the pain doesn’t seep in at the back of his mind like the dull roar of the ocean, eased with time but never forgotten. He stands at the gate and peeks through the gaps in the boards they’d covered them up with, and he hopes that maybe one day their fates will align and she’ll walk past somewhere he can see her.

It never happens, not once in four years.

He doesn’t forget them, not the dead, nor the zombies. He has a hundred photos of Addison, of his dad, and a few videos of everyone together at a birthday party, stuff he makes sure to save from his phone so that he can look back on it when he needs to. Addison’s parents won’t give him anything of her, but her cousin, Bucky, grudgingly sends him copies of her cheer performances and he looks at them often, determined not to forget her face or her voice, or the way he’d loved her, even as young as they were.

The last part is hard. It becomes distant over time, no matter how hard he tries to hold on, until some nights he lies awake in the dark and wonders if that love was worth holding on to at all.

Eliza is different. Eliza is forever stamped in his brain; he can’t forget her, no matter how hard he tries. He barely remembers growing up with her now – he only remembers losing her, and the fear in her eyes as she’d clutched at his hand through those bars, so close and yet forever out of his reach.

And then, one morning, Dale Wells appears on his TV and introduces the Z-band and a rehabilitated zombie, and all the memories come flooding back.

\---

It takes another two years for the gates to open again, for zombies to be safe enough to walk among.

Zed is the first one through the gates. He is the only one through the gates – only a few people made it out of the explosion, and of those that are left, not many want to return after so many years away. He is let in with a pat on the back from the Z Patrol and a warning that if he gets eaten, they are not expected to come and save him.

The zombies are peaceful, for the most part. Some of them eye him off as he walks past, busy rifling through trash and old houses for anything salvageable, but most of them ignore him. They seem to just be wandering around aimlessly, glassy-eyed and docile under the effects of their new Z-bands. Zed doesn’t mind, so long as they don’t eat him.

He goes to the power plant first; not to go in, just to look, to see the burnt-out husk of the building where his dad had died, to feel like maybe he could say a last goodbye. Then he follows the roads home, a path so familiar it’s still second nature to follow, even with the town as trashed and crumbling as it is.

The garden is gone, the fence splintered into many pieces of wood, Zoey’s swing toppled onto its side. The door stands ajar so he lets himself in, creeping through the dark and empty rooms of his childhood.

Everything is still where it was, more or less, he finds as he explores. There’s things everywhere – family photos, Zoey’s dolls, his football cards and all his sports stuff, his trophies gathering dust on their shelves. His bed still sits unmade from the last time he’d slept in it, and there’s a tray in the oven with the remnants of a sheet of cookie paper flaked at the bottom of it, the cookies long since rotted away. His dad’s nametag is on the kitchen table – he would always forget it. Zed stares at it for a long moment, and then tucks it into his pocket with the photos he’d been able to find.

He’s in the kitchen, staring out at the grey patch of the backyard where once green grass had grown, when the floorboards creak behind him as someone enters the room.

He jumps a mile in the air and whips around, his heart pounding, expecting gnashing teeth and dead eyes – and then just as quickly as it started, his heart stops dead, because it is _her_ , barely a day older than how he remembers her, and just the same as she’d always been, down to her clothes.

Well, not exactly the same. She is paler now, and her eyes are red-lined and tired-looking, even as she stares at him suspiciously. But her hair is still white, and she’s in a sparkling cheer jacket, and he can just about imagine that no time has passed between them when he looks at her.

“What are you doing in here?” she asks, guarded, suspicious… _afraid_ , he realises. For a moment, he’s confused, that she would be afraid of him, that she doesn’t understand why he is here; and then he remembers the reports from the news, the studies the Z Patrol have been doing as they slowly bring the zombies back to life.

 _Zombies don’t age_ , they’ve been saying, causing stir amongst the vainer members of Seabrook’s population. _Zombies don’t remember their human lives anymore_.

“Are you okay?” she asks, her brow furrowed in concern, and he clears his throat.

“I used to live here,” he tells her, and pretends not to hear her second question. “Before zombies, before…I just came to get my family’s photos and stuff before someone threw them out.”

“You used to…live here?” she repeats. “I thought I…” She stops and looks around, like she’s confused, like she can’t decide what is real and what is a lie. Her eyes return to his face, narrowed, staring at him as if she sees something familiar about him. “Do I know you?” she asks.

He takes a step back, the edge of the counter pressing into his spine. _You know me_ , he wants to say – he wants to tell her everything, wants to beg and plead with her to remember, but he stops himself before he can say it, before any of it can spill from his mouth. Is it unfair, to tell her all of these things, when she doesn’t have a clue who he is? When she can’t remember her mother, or her father, when she thinks his house is her house, but she isn’t even sure about that?

When it’s been four years for him, and only a day for her, a blink in her life, a blur of hunger and madness and empty, mindless pain?

“I know you,” she says as he lets the silence stretch too long, caught in his indecision. “Don’t I? I know you, I used to know-” She steps forward, and places her shaking hands on the back of one of the chairs tucked neatly under the table, staring at him. “Just tell me,” she requests. “Please. Tell me who I am.”

“You’re Addison,” he whispers, and as her name slips from between his lips, it takes all the air from his lungs with it. He sags against the counter, runs a hand nervously through his hair and touches the old photos stuffed in his pocket. “You were my – my friend.” _I love you_ , his mind whispers, and the words are on the tip of his tongue when he swallows them back down, too afraid to say them. “This was my house. You lived on the other side of the wall.”

She frowns. “I lived…out there? Where the humans live?” He nods. “How did I end up here then?”

“You walked my little sister home for me after school on the day of the explosion,” he explains, and his voice cracks at the memory if it. “I had to stay at school. And then…” It flashes through his mind; the rumble of the explosion, the smoke, the sirens. The monsters at the gate, Eliza’s face, the woman-

“I should go home,” he says abruptly, shaking himself, and he circles around the edge of the kitchen to get to the door behind her.

“I think I remember you,” she says as he’s about to step out of the room, making him pause. He hears her shift behind him, turning to speak to his back. His skin crawls at the thought of mad eyes and sharp teeth and insatiable hunger-

“You played football,” she hurries to add, like she’s afraid that if she loses his attention, he’ll walk away and never come back. “I used to bring you the cards from the cereal boxes. And your sister…your sister…” She trails off, and he turns around to find her staring at the logo on her jacket, searching for a memory she can’t quite reach.

“My sister used to do cheer,” he finishes for her, watching from the doorway. “Like you.”

She smiles, soft and bright enough to reach her eyes. He feels weak just looking at her, like his legs might give out from underneath him. “Yes,” she says, and her hand relaxes around the hem of her jacket. “Like me.”

A smile tugs at his lips for the first time since he’d entered the town, and she beams back at him, a hand tucking her hair behind her ear. He wants to stay longer, wants to keep talking to her – but the Z band catches his eye as she moves, and his mind reminds him; _sharp teeth, mad eyes_ , _hunger_.

“I should go,” he says again, and takes a step backwards, into the dark living room at the front of the house. Her face falls.

There’s a long silence; he can’t bring himself to move, and she doesn’t quite know what she wants to say. “Are you scared of me?” she asks eventually, her voice small and hollow.

“No!” he hurries to reply, and then recoils when she flinches, like she knows the truth. “…maybe,” he amends his statement and shifts uncomfortably on his feet. “I don’t want to be, I just…”

“It’s okay.” She takes a deep breath, and then she tries to smile again, shaking it off. “It was nice to meet you…to see you again…um…”

“Zed,” he offers, when her tongue runs dry. “My name is Zed.”

“Zed,” she echoes, the same way she had the day they met, seven long years ago. He nods and backs away again, slowly crossing his old living room.

“Will you come back?” she asks as he leaves, hanging in the doorway like she’s afraid to come any further.

He pauses, surprised. “Do you want me to?” he asks.

"I..." she falters, words failing her. He watches her carefully, watches as she shifts nervously, unsure where to put her arms or where to put herself. He can tell there's something she's not saying, something important, but he doesn't want to push her away or scare her off - not when he just got her back.

"It's okay if - " he starts, but she cuts him off with a shake of her head.

"No, no, I'm just..." She inhales and exhales, and Zed's eyes flicker down to where she's twisting her hands together. "I don't want to hurt you," she blurts all at once, surprising him into pausing once again.

He takes a deep breath, one that rattles him right down to his very core, and then crosses the room and wraps his hand around her wrist, her eyes snapping up to meet his. He smiles, hoping it looks as warm as he tries to make it. "Do you want me to come back?" he asks again, softer this time.

She blinks, breathes in and out, and then nods, the corner of her lips twitching. "Yeah, Zed," she whispers, his name sweet on her cracked lips. "Yeah. I would like that."

**Author's Note:**

> thankyou for reading! please remember to leave a comment if you enjoyed this, and check out my tumblr @zombiedadjokes for more of my content :)


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